Quantitative Assessment of Left Ventricular Function: Steady-State Free Precession MR Imaging with or without Sensitivity Encoding

Abstract

Quantitative left ventricular (LV) function was assessed with magnetic resonance imaging in 20 patients by using standard multisection multiphase steady-state free precession (SSFP) imaging and sensitivity encoding (SENSE)-accelerated cine SSFP imaging with identical spatial, contrast, and temporal resolution. The local institutional review board approved the protocol, and all patients gave signed informed consent prior to imaging. The study complied with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Results of Bland-Altman analysis showed that both techniques produced similar estimates of LV ejection fraction, LV mass, and blood-to-muscle contrast and demonstrated minimal interobserver variability. The authors showed that it is possible, by combining SENSE with cine SSFP imaging, to reduce acquisition time by 50% without compromising spatial resolution, temporal resolution, or blood-to-muscle contrast-to-noise ratio compared with those achieved by using SSFP imaging without SENSE for quantitative LV function assessment.

Interstudy reproducibility of SSFP cine magnetic resonance: Impact of magnetic field strength and parallel imaging

“…However, limited studies describe the interstudy reproducibility of SSFP CMR with sensitivity-encoding techniques (9,25,26). Wintersperger et al (9) compared LV volumetric measurements between 1.5T and accelerated 3T studies using TSENSE, but neither myocardial mass nor RV volumetric data were presented, and only ten subjects were studied.…”

Rapid assessment of regional and global left ventricular function using three-dimensional k-t BLAST imaging

“…To minimize such effects, ROIs were drawn in a region within the lung space at each location (basal, mid and apical slices), without any observable signal. The standard deviation of the signal intensity within the ROI of the lung was used as the noise metric [7,8].…”

“…While several studies have used 2D SSFP as the reference technique when comparing multiple sequences for the calculation of EF, the lack of an independent gold standard remains a notable limitation of this and previous studies [7][8][9]11,15,30,35]. It should be noted that 2D SSFP cine imaging techniques are often considered as the gold standard for the measurement of LV volumes due to the high spatial, contrast and temporal resolution of this method.…”

“…Thus, a number of groups have attempted to address this issue by reducing the acquisition time to a few breath-holds. Some commonly used approaches include the incorporation of parallel imaging methods such as sensitivity encoding (SENSE) [6][7][8], undersampled projection reconstruction methods [9] or real-time imaging approaches [10][11][12][13][14][15]. Parallel imaging approaches have been shown to reduce acquisition times by a factor of 2-3.…”

Cardiac Function

“…A third and highly versatile approach is parallel imaging (see ''Cardiac MR Physics''; Sodickson and Manning 1997;Griswold et al 1999;Weiger et al 2000;van den Brink et al 2003). Parallel imaging offers a spectrum of flexibility that can be used to shorten scan times in patients with limited breath-hold capacity, or to increase the temporal or spatial resolution (Kacere et al 2005). One of the major strengths of MRI is its high spatial resolution.…”